


Even if You Want To

by nicasio_silang



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, trigger warning: addiction/recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 15:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/688462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even if You Want To

**Author's Note:**

> 1x15 coda.

Blood is soaked into the floorboards. Angus, still in pieces. Not a difficult puzzle, considering the numbering, and that the shards are all quite large. Watson goes up to bed, the ceiling creaks to the length of her body as she lies down. You check the pocket of your waistcoat. You will finish the repairs tonight.

It was never of question of are you an addict. It was always a game: how long can you remain useful? How long can life remain interesting? How long until it’s no longer worthwhile, how much of you left over to offer up to your work. You never stopped giving them what they wanted: the spark and the spark and the spark. So what if you took a month off to lay in the bath? So what if you spent the latter half of a week under the writing desk staying very, very still? So what the neighbors and their dogs and the beds of your nails, so what the bruises, the ruined knuckles, the dents in the walls, so what your eyes sinking backwards into their sockets, your collarbones rising like daggers at your neck.

If it was a problem, then it was your problem to sustain or to suspend. At the end of its usefulness, you would have stopped it on your own, given the time and a choice. It was your own writing desk to use, it’s your own neck to cut.

You still get caught in the closed loop sometimes. Circular, belligerent. 

Accept that you are powerless over the addiction. You accept that you are powerless and so, reasonably, you choose to give in to the addiction. Choosing makes you feel a sense of power over the addiction; you are temporarily gleeful in your indulgence. You remember the pleasure of it, you wake up on time, you have more energy, you solve the backlog. You relax into it. You relax so much so that you cannot get up, you have no energy, you don’t answer your phone, you need a hit more than you, you don’t know what else you could need. On the cold, dry porcelain of the bath, you lose control of the choice, powerless over the addiction. 

You rinse. You repeat.

People need things, everyone seems to think. Watson seems to think. Most of the things people cling to are unnecessary. Their circadian rhythms, their soft places to sleep, their steady lover, their polished appearance, their every single molar. You can strip it to the bare slats and live despite that. Quite well, in fact, given certain lowered expectations.

The problem with Watson is the problem with everyone at the rehab clinic, it is the problem behind even Gregson’s acceptance, his patience. It’s the problem with meetings, with sponsors, with WebMD. This beloved, intimate, vile thing that made your eyelids droop, the thing you nurtured, fed, caressed, hated, adored, this marriage your body made is to them a list of familiar, pedestrian symptoms. A story told over and over until it’s sanded down into a one-sentence diagnosis. 

Nine months before you began to get clean, you attended a single NA meeting. You could, if you wanted to, that was the point, so you did. A woman spoke. Late 20’s, growing out of a mohawk and chemist-bought blonde hair dye, engaged since at least the summer but keeping her ring in her pocket for the night, waitress’ shoes, acne red and picked-at. Not sober for nearly as long as she claimed. 

“Half measures availed us nothing,” she repeated from the mantra. (Of course there was a mantra: a means of self-hypnosis and a manufactured uniting commonality all in one.) “I made rules for myself,” she said. She spoke through a mild stutter. “I only shot up on weekends. Friday counted, but then Monday counted too, and then I only shot up after dark. Then only after noon. And when I broke my rules, it wasn’t,” she rubbed at the stubble of her half-shaved scalp, dandruff and other debris visible in the air around her. “It wasn’t like I was _breaking the rules_ because it was always a decision I made. I made a choice to keep changing the rules, then to just get rid of them. Took a while to figure out that it’s not really a choice if it’s there's only one choice you can make.”

You were high within an hour of leaving. 

Yes, you are an addict, but you are nothing like those people. You don’t enjoy their platitudinous, masturbatory group confessional, nor their instant coffee and store brand donuts. They’ve never been to the places you go. You do not need the things they need. And the meeting tonight, well, the meeting tonight, well, the meeting tonight. Well. To harmlessly fill up an evening that could not be safely spent alone.

Still, it could have been worse: Rhys brought you only cocaine. You know yourself to be an oblivion junkie at heart. It’s the off switch that you crave, to live in a place where nothing matters. Cocaine is an accelerant, and as a general rule, you do not resort to uppers. 

Piece by piece, Angus recovers. The last shard is split along the areas governing self-esteem and love of approbation. The baggie drops neatly between them. And then it’s over.


End file.
